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Preventing accidents at red lights wins first prize

By Lisa Krebs

Posted:
05/27/2013 07:39:33 PM MDT

Updated:
05/27/2013 07:39:58 PM MDT

Alakh Patel won first prize at Flagstaff Academy's Science, Technology, Engineering and Math fair with his project "Preventing Accidents from Red-Light Running in Intersections." Lily Sartor won second with "Melamine in Milk," and Zachary Beckwith took third place with his experiment on "Distracted Driving."

"One of the coolest things about our projects this year is that they address real problems and look at ways to make things better for real people," said Charlie Warren, assistant principal at the middle school.

Patel calculated the speed of a car going through an intersection, and if a car's speed was too fast through the intersection on a yellow light, the other light stays red for an extra 30 seconds. This creates another red light at the same time but prevents vehicles from entering the intersection at the same time as another vehicle running a red light.

"A lot of people speed," said Patel. "You can't prevent speeding, but you can control accidents by controlling lights."

Patel's biggest challenge was programming the display. Orginally, his program displayed in Hex, and it needed to display in Decimal. His biggest moment was getting the program to work and display properly. "It was 2 a.m. a few days before the project, and it finally worked with the right display," said Patel.

Beckwith's project on distracted driving tested drivers' ability to function while talking to a passenger, talking on a cellphone and texting.

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Beckwith didn't know what to do as his science project until he saw an article in a newspaper about how distracted driving is worse than drunk driving.

Beckwith used a driving video game for the experiment. "The baseline was no distractions, but because of the learning curve of learning the video game, drivers did better talking to a passenger than focusing on driving. There were more distracting errors with drivers talking on a phone because of the manual and cognitive distraction. Texting resulted in three times worse ability than the baseline. It's because there are three distractions: cognitive, manual and visual. When you're texting, your mind, hands and eye are off the road."

The danger with texting is the amount of time it takes a driver's eyes off the road.

"If you're traveling 60 mph, in four seconds you can travel about two lengths of a football field. Your car becomes a missile."

The three winners and 15 other middle school students will attend and compete in the Corden Pharma Colorado Regional Science Fair at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "This is a great opportunity for our young scientists," said Warren.

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